The woman beside her was Tara. The story Casey told had been about Tara from the start. That two years ago, at a lake party, I got drunk and left Tara stranded, sick, alone at two in the morning, and drove off with her boyfriend.
Tara had moved to Denver right after that summer. She had only been back in town for three weeks. She had never heard the story. Not once.
She looked at Casey. Then she looked at me. Then she put her drink down on the counter.
She said, that is not what happened.
She told the whole kitchen. That night at the lake, she got sick. Really sick. It turned out to be her appendix. Everybody else had already left or was too drunk to drive. Casey had gone home at midnight. I was the one who found Tara on the bathroom floor. I was the one who drove her forty minutes to the hospital, sober, in the dark. I sat in the emergency room with her until her mom got there at six in the morning.
And her boyfriend? He had broken up with her a week before. He was not even at the party.
For two years I had been walking into rooms where people went quiet, and the one person who could have cleared my name did not even know there was anything to clear.
Nobody in that kitchen said anything for a long time. The host, Rachel, set the wine bottle all the way down.
Casey said she must have heard it wrong. She said somebody told her. Tara asked her who. Casey did not have an answer. She got her coat and left a few minutes later.
Tara hugged me in that kitchen for a long time. She said she was so sorry. She said she wrote me a thank you card from the hospital and never mailed it because she moved so fast. She still had it. She mailed it to me that next week.
Over the next month, people started reaching out. Friends I had not heard from in two years. Most of them said the same thing. They were sorry. They should have asked me. They should not have believed it just because Casey told it so well.
Some of those friendships came back. Some did not. I made my peace with both.
One message surprised me. It was from a woman named Joanne who worked in hiring at the company that had pulled my job offer the year before. Joanne had been at the party that night in the kitchen. She said she heard the story from Casey two years ago and passed it on to her manager. She said she felt sick about it.
She said there was a new opening on her team. She asked if I would apply.
I did. I got the job.
Tara and I get dinner once a month now. She tells everyone who will listen that I saved her life.
I tell her I just drove the car.